On Sunday, July 18, 2010 05:26:26 pm John Van Ostrand wrote:
> There was a time when ITSPs did not do "forward on no-registration". Also
> the nature of ITSPs is often such that they fail to have as much
> redundancy as conventional Telcos. As much as I like Unlimitel they've had
Fair enough, but a backhoe taking out the copper between the CO and your office
is going to also show how redundant your line is from Bell... Granted, once
you're at the CO, the connections are very well managed and fully fault-
tolerant, to the point where it's mandated that the redundant links enter at
different physical points in the building and must take different paths to the
next hop. It's actually pretty interesting stuff, at least to a telco geek like
myself.
> many, many hours where incoming calls were not reaching Unlimitel. Their
> redundant T1 links turned out not to be as redundant as they thought and
I've had some personal experience in that regard... Had a DS3 MUX whose fully-
redundant switching processor modules weren't... Main one failed, backup took
over long enough to die in a puff of smoke and to top it off UPS lost our
OMGWTFBBQ 9am is too late overnighted delivery. 672 lines down for 48 hours
was not a fun time. Lesson learned, though, and that's why after that we had
replacement hardware sitting on the shelf waiting.
Man, remembering that particular failure still gives me the screaming heebie-
jeebies.
> were dig up by one excavator. In that case it didn't matter if you
> subscribed to Unlimitel's forward service, you didn't get your calls. We
> would have been negligent to our customers to provide a better alternative
> (i.e. forward a POTS line to unlimitel) in the wake of those failures.
Negligent? I don't know about that... Failures DO happen and I have yet to
meet one business who really does fully understand the costs involved and is
prepared to pay them in order to have truly 100% failsafe backups.
> We generally don't pick the DSL for customers, they do. We are
> experimenting with unlimitel DSL as a way to provide a direct IP
> connection for VoIP. We expect it should make for very good quality VoIP
> connections since Unlimitel shapes the download traffic for VoIP.
I haven't heard of anyone whose actually used the service... if you do, please
let me know how it goes. This is exactly the same kind of facility that SCS
Internet's building out, except that they're provider-agnostic.
> Yup, we have Atria and our VoIP is great, but I can't see asking a customer
> with four phone lines to purchase a $400 (or more) Internet connection any
> pay huge provisioning costs to replace four $35 phone lines and a $70 DSL
> connection. Medium sized offices with a dozen phone lines often do just
> well on DSL for Internet so it's hard to justify the extra cost. So an
> office with 4 lines probably doesn't either. Believe me when I say we try
> a lot to convince customers to get better Internet, it rarely works.
Depends on the company and what they are doing for sure.
> I just can't believe that a used 8x4 PBX with phones can get enough on eBay
> to pay for an Asterisk server and the consulting to do all this work.
Oh, I did not mean to imply that the old KSU would be able to pay for the cost
of the replacement infrastructure, although if you take a look at some of the
prices they want for old Nortel gear you'd be amazed. The best you'd hope to
do would be to offset some of the cost.
> My point about the fax was not that an alternative to POTS didn't exist,
> but rather that it's an example of how the quality of VoIP audio (over
> unmanaged Internet) is not sufficient to support faxes or modems.
I think it's two completely separate things. Sure, you can use modems and fax
machines on POTS lines without difficulty but you are also locked into the "one
line, one call" nature of the beast. VOIP lifts those limitations (and imposes
other ones) so to me at least it is a matter of deciding which set of
constraints are best for the customer.
To me it really does seem a lot like the old "horseless carriage" comparisons
when Ford was bringing the automobile to the market. To most people the
concept of "one line one call" is so entrenched that they have difficulty
understanding that they can pull in multiple calls with one line without any
problem whatsoever.
Another example: I find that it's very similar to the old KSU vs PBX mentality
as well. How may small offices are *so used* to having "line keys" on their
phones that when you try to train them about their new PBX the first thing that
confounds them is that there is no "Line 1" key... because there is no concept
of "Line 1" anymore?
VOIP's a different beast in a familliar guise, and that causes a lot of people
trouble. It's these kinds of expectations that people such as yourself and I
find ourselves managing time and time again with customers who want to try
"this VOIP thing".
-A.